A few years ago his mum Doreen had come into String Theory to buy her son a cheap keyboard. She’d been worried about his behaviour at school and he’d expressed an interest in music and so she wanted to get him piano lessons. Nora explained she had an electric piano, and could play, but had no formal teacher training. Doreen had explained she didn’t have much money but they struck a deal, and Nora had enjoyed her Tuesday evenings teaching Leo the difference between major and minor seventh chords and thought he was a great boy, eager to learn.

Doreen had seen Leo was ‘getting caught up in the wrong set’, but when he got into music he started doing well in other things too. And suddenly he wasn’t getting into trouble with teachers any more, and he’d play everything from Chopin through Scott Joplin to Frank Ocean and John Legend and Rex Orange County with the same care and commitment.

Something Mrs Elm had said on an early visit to the Midnight Library came to her.

Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .

In this timeline right now, the one where she had studied a Master’s at Cambridge, and married Ash and had a baby, she hadn’t been in String Theory on the day four years ago when Doreen and Leo came by. In this timeline, Doreen never found a music teacher who was cheap enough, and so Leo never persisted with music for long enough to realise he had a talent. He never sat there, side-by-side with Nora on a Tuesday evening, pursuing a passion that he extended at home, producing his own tunes.

Nora felt herself weaken. Not just tingles and fuzziness but something stronger, a sense of plunging into nothingness, accompanied by a brief darkening of her vision. A feeling of another Nora right there in the wings, ready to pick up where this one left off. Her brain ready to fill in the gaps and have a perfectly legitimate reason to be on a day trip to Bedford, and to fill in every absence as if she was here the whole time.

Worried she knew what it meant, she turned away from Leo and his friend as they were escorted away to the police car, the eyes of the whole of Bedford high street upon them, and she started to quicken her pace towards the car park.

This is a good life . . . This is a good life . . . This is a good life . . .

A New Way of Seeing

She got closer to the station, passing the garish red-and-yellow zigzags of La Cantina, like a Mexican migraine, with a waiter inside taking chairs off tables. And String Theory too, closed, with a handwritten notice on the door:

Alas, String Theory is no longer able to trade in these premises. Due to an increase in rent we simply couldn’t afford to go on. Thanks to all our loyal customers. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. You Can Go Your Own Way. God Only Knows What We’ll Be Without You.

It was the exact same note she had seen with Dylan. Judging by the date, written in small felt-tip letters from Neil’s hand, it was from nearly three months ago.

She felt sad, because String Theory had meant a lot to people. Yet Nora hadn’t been working at String Theory when it got into trouble.

Well. I suppose I did sell a lot of electric pianos. And some rather nice guitars too.

Growing up, she and Joe had always joked about their hometown, the way teenagers do, and used to say that HMP Bedford was the inner prison and the rest of the town was just the outer prison, and any chance you had to escape you should take it.

But the sun was out now, as she neared the station, and it seemed that she had been looking at the place wrong all these years. As she passed the statue of prison reformer John Howard in St Paul’s Square, with the trees all around and the river just behind, refracting light, she marvelled at it as if she were seeing it for the first time. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Driving back to Cambridge cocooned in her expensive Audi, smelling almost nauseatingly of vinyl and plastic and other synthetic materials, weaving through busy traffic, the cars sliding by like forgotten lives, she was deeply wishing she had been able to see Mrs Elm, the real one, before she had died. It would have been good to have one last game of chess with her before she passed away. And she thought of poor Leo, sat in a small windowless cell at a Bedford police station, waiting for Doreen to come and collect him.

‘This is the best life,’ she told herself, a little desperately now. ‘This is the best life. I am staying here. This is the life for me. This is the best life. This is the best life.’

But she knew she didn’t have long.

The Flowers Have Water

She pulled up at the house and ran inside, as Plato padded happily to greet her.

‘Hello?’ she asked, desperately. ‘Ash? Molly?’

She needed to see them. She knew she didn’t have long. She could feel the Midnight Library waiting for her.

‘Outside!’ said Ash, chirpily, from the back garden.

And so Nora went through to find Molly on her tricycle again, unfazed by her previous accident, while Ash was tending to a flower-bed.

‘How was your trip?’

Molly climbed off her tricycle and ran over. ‘Mummy! I missed you! I’m really good at biking now!’

‘Are you, darling?’

She hugged her daughter close and closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of her hair and the dog and fabric conditioner and childhood, and she hoped the wonder of it would help keep her there. ‘I love you, Molly, I want you to know that. For ever and ever, do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mummy. Of course.’

‘And I love your daddy too. And everything will be okay because whatever happens you will always have Daddy and you will have Mummy too, it’s just I might not be here in the exact same way. I’ll be here, but . . .’ She realised Molly needed to know nothing else except one truth. ‘I love you.’

Molly looked concerned. ‘You forgot Plato!’

‘Well, obviously I love Plato . . . How could I forget Plato? Plato knows I love him, don’t you, Plato? Plato, I love you.’

Nora tried to compose herself.

Whatever happens, they will be looked after. They will be loved. And they have each other and they will be happy.

Then Ash came over, with his gardening gloves on. ‘You okay, Nor? You seem a bit pale. Did anything happen?’

‘Oh, I’ll tell you about it later. When Molly’s in bed.’

‘Okay. Oh, there’s a shop coming any time . . . So keep an ear out for the lorry.’

‘Sure. Yeah. Yeah.’

And then Molly asked if she could get the watering can out and Ash explained that as it had been raining a lot recently it wasn’t necessary, because the sky had been looking after the flowers. ‘They’ll be okay. They’re looked after. The flowers have water.’ And the words echoed in Nora’s mind. They’ll be okay. They’re looked after . . . And then Ash said something about going to the cinema tonight and how the babysitter was all arranged and Nora had forgotten completely but just smiled and tried really hard to hold on, to stay there, but it was happening, it was happening, she knew it from within every hidden chamber of her being, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it.

Nowhere to Land

‘NO!’

Unmistakably, it had happened.

She was back in the Midnight Library.

Mrs Elm was at the computer. The lights wobbled and shook and flickered overhead in fast arrhythmic blinks. ‘Nora, stop. Calm down. Be a good girl. I need to sort this out.’

Dust fell in thin wisps from the ceiling, from cracks fissuring and spreading like spider webs woven at unnatural speed. There was the sound of sudden, active destruction which, in her sad fury, Nora found herself managing to ignore.

‘You’re not Mrs Elm. Mrs Elm is dead . . . Am I dead?’

‘We’ve been through this. But now you mention it, maybe you’re about to be . . .’

‘Why aren’t I still there? Why aren’t I there? I could sense it was happening but I didn’t want it to. You said that if I found a life I wanted to live in – that I really wanted to live in – then I’d stay there. You said I’d forget about this stupid place. You said I could find the life I wanted. That was the life I wanted. That was the life!’

Moments ago she had been in the garden with Ash and Nora and Plato, a garden humming with life and love, and now she was here.

‘Take me back . . .’

‘You know it doesn’t work like that.’

‘Well, take me to the closest variation. Give me the closest possible thing to that life. Please, Mrs Elm, it must be possible. There must be a life where I went for the coffee with Ash and where we had Molly and Plato, but I . . . I did something slightly different. So it was technically another life. Like I chose a different dog collar for Plato. Or . . . or . . . Or where I – I don’t know – where I did Pilates instead of yoga? Or where I went to a different college at Cambridge? Or if it has to be further back, where it wasn’t coffee on the date but tea? That life. Take me to the life where I did that. Come on. Please. Help me out. I’d like to try one of those lives, please . . .’

The computer started to smoke. The screen went black. The whole monitor fell to pieces.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Mrs Elm, defeated, as she collapsed back into the office chair.